Your Hero has the flu

[Steve]

Any character that does not have the proper Life Support ability to resist colds or the flu can get sick.

 

The only instances I can remember of this happening in the comics involved Spider-Man, who seems to get sick almost every winter, especially when he was a teen.

 

So, your character has caught a bad cold, the flu, or maybe even COVID.
 

How does that affect their abilities? Do they hide out until they recover or keep struggling to keep the city safe despite their illness?

[Christopher R Taylor]

Probably just be a mild drain on a few stats like DEX, CON, REC, END, and maybe CV.  Probably a physical complication requiring a CON or EGO roll to do anything strenuous.

[LoneWolf]

Most super heroes have a CON of at least 18.  With a CON that high you probably rarely get sick anyways. That same CON will mean your character probably handles the illness better than normal.  

[Gauntlet]

Even if a superhero (or supervillain) does get sick the limitations are probably rather low, maybe a 1d6 Drain. Plus, I'm not sure any GM would worry about having characters get the flu anyways unless it is something directly part of the session, and even then I would guess it would be something much worse then the flu.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah I don't even bother with this kind of thing in my games; heroes don't get the sniffles.  But there are genres that makes sense in.

[cbullard]

3 hours ago, Steve said:

The only instances I can remember of this happening in the comics involved Spider-Man, who seems to get sick almost every winter, especially when he was a teen.

Yeah, the only other example that comes to mind would be more of a "Heroic" genre: Stargate/Stargate SG-1, where Daniel Jackson spent a good portion of his early screentime sneezing his head off.  They even made it into a plot point for a later episode, where the antihistamines he'd taken protected him from a disease ("The Broca Divide").

 

3 hours ago, Steve said:

How does that affect their abilities? Do they hide out until they recover or keep struggling to keep the city safe despite their illness?

 

An excellent question.  The rulebook occasionally mentions things like inflicting or curing a disease, but I don't see anything on how to judge the effects of a disease on a PC.

[DShomshak]

My last Champions adventure was a fill-in because we didn't have the players for either the regular campaign's ongoing story, or the backup campaign's ongoing story. So we had two members of the Avant Guard hero team, plus a guest hero. Regular member Night Train was out bec ause he caught Covid, and a dragon robbing a biotech supply company in Buffalo, NY didn't seem apocalyptic enough to require his presence.

 

Supers getting sick is something that happens offscreen.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Steve]

I’m wondering if this is something that could be a subset of Unluck. That would explain why Spider-Man gets sick, but other superheroes don’t seem to get the flu.

[Asperion]

If I were to make some character get any illness,  I would ignore their ability scores and declare that they have the problem. Effects would be along lines of temporary drain that last until I say otherwise. Abilities affected would include CON, SPD, INT, STR, effective all (include powers). This drain will be strong,  like reducing to half start levels. This might sound overkill,  but consider how you respond to similar IRL diseases. Those that exist in a superverse should have a more powerful effect on those they infect.